This is what you need to throw multiple 4K images around

Plenty of power: Wings Engine Raw 8K

Our industry doesn’t have the monopoly on needing to work with 4K images. Digital Signage is increasingly upping the resolution ante too, and the recent ISE show in Amsterdam confirmed its 4K future.

That means it needs some powerful media servers to drive all those videowalls at 4K, and the likes of AV Stumpfl’s Wings Engine Raw 8K epitomises what you can find at the top end of the signage field in 2016.

In fact, Wings Engine Raw 8K can deliver four streams of full 4K uncompressed content at 60hz, plus media overlays, text generation and even show control on top. How you use them is up to you: either combining them into that one 8K image its name suggests with soft edge blending, mapping and geometry correction, or driving what the company refers to as a ‘virtually unlimited’ amount of LED screens.

Essentially, it’ s a custom engineered RAID 10 system. Content includes native picture sequences such as TGA or TIFF and instant PNG image format processing. The system processes and delivers video content at full 4:4:4 colour sampling, and uses a proprietary WingsRX render core engine with a 64-bit program architecture that uses SSE CPU instructions to speed up content processing. It also runs AV Stumpfl’s embedded operating system, Backup-Manager, that features dedicated EDID (Extended Display Identification Data) management for fairly robust plug and play, and an automatic camera-based calibration system for that soft-edge blending, warp, and geometry mapping.

There is, of course, a school of thought that says that 8K will only ever really make sense in the display industry. So, if we’re after kit that has the sort of horsepower required to deal with that sort of content, it’s not a bad place to go shopping.